In 1964, four years
prior to the appearance of We're Only In It For The Money by Frank
Zappa and The Mothers of Invention, the British Labour Party set up a
Commission chaired by Lord Reith of Stonehaven, the first Director General
of the BBC, to "consider the role of commercial advertising in present day
society and to recommend whether reforms are required". Reith was an
outspoken paternalist who regarded American TV economics as a kind of
moral-weaponised dirty bomb in the hands of fanatics ready to terrorise
the British plebs (whom he himself had betrayed during the General Strike
of 1926).(1) Reacting to the advent of commercial television in 1956,
Reith evacuated a stubborn warning from history into the House of Lords:
"Somebody introduced Christianity into England and somebody introduced
smallpox, bubonic plague, and the Black Death. Somebody is minded now to
introduce sponsored broadcasting...Need we be ashamed of moral values, or
of intellectual and ethical objectives? It is these that are here and now
at stake". (2) He might also have mentioned that somebody likewise
introduced the House of Lords, moral values, and even himself; but at
least two of these things had probably been introduced to England from the
inside rather than from the outside, and it is introduction from the
outside that tends to reawaken the chivalric attitude in a person of
Reith's class. (3) Reith's fatherliness was of a common sort, both true
and false. True, because moral and intellectual values were in fact
undeniably at stake, and would undergo extreme mutation as a result of the
American influx he sought to prevent. False, because he failed to admit
that it was the inevitable tendency of oligopolistic capitalist economies
trying to remain competitive in the mid-twentieth century to substitute
advertising for price competition as the principal weapon of
profitability; (4) and false also because the moral and intellectual
values he so passionately mentioned were assuredly unknown to him from any
perspective other than that of a career-propagandist. In any case, moral
outrage at the tip of the superstructure was never likely to defeat
capitalism on its own basic turf, and despite Lord Reith's fiery
imprecations Britain was soon to be overrun by a horde of image-makers and
their made-up images, with its ears, minds and off-shore bank accounts
kept thereafter permanently agape for all the fantasies of good living
they could squeeze into their splitting apertures. By 1968 this invasion
of compulsory commodity-life was, even in the United States, still in its
infancy, most likely somewhere around the anal stage; which makes We're
Only In It For The Money a first-rate example of what Georg Lukács called
genuinely avant-garde art, that is, art which expresses from within the
superstructure an accurate anticipation of forthcoming economic reality.
The album's anticipatory power is expressed not in a straightforward
critique of commodity-life and its human billboards, but more radically,
in a sickening string of jokes at the expense of hippies and the whole
dopey counter-culture that imagined itself to be the enemy of the state,
whereas in fact that counter-culture turned out, as Zappa predicted, to be
an object lesson in how to be recuperated by capitalism. The album, like
much of Zappa's music, is a critique not of commodity-life itself but of
the counter-cultural stupefaction that guarantees the continual success of
the capitalist recuperation industry.

The following paper
will attempt a theoretical homage to Zappa's 1968 album in two
interrelated polemics dealing not only with commodity-life in the 1960s
but with its current apparition also. The first of these polemics deals
with some psychoanalytic ideas about pop music, magic and love, and their
relation to advertising. The second is an attempt to think about what
irrecuperable art would look or sound like in a society dominated by
marketing, and to propose some conditions for irrecuperability in future
art. This second polemic is directed quite predictably at the
post-structuralist notion of reading as a kind of free play or production
of meaning by the consumer of art.

The first issue of
Internationale Situationniste, published in June 1958, featured an
unsigned article called 'The Struggle for the Control of the New
Techniques of Conditioning'. Like much of the Situationist material that
would appear in the journal itself, the article is pretty thin on the
ground when it comes to outright proposals for practical action; but it
does include a declaration of intent that plainly distinguishes it from
anything that Adorno or other humanists might have said:

...it must be
understood that we are going to assist, to participate in, the race
between free artists and the police to experiment with and to develop
uses for the new techniques of conditioning. In this race the police
already have a considerable advantage. The outcome of the race will
depend on the appearance of passionate and liberating environments, or
the reinforcement-under smooth scientific control-of the environment
of the old world of oppression and horror.
(5)

The article mentions
the conditioning of an incarcerated Hungarian revolutionary, Lajos Ruff,
by soviet police agents and psychologists in a specially designed,
psychotropic jail cell, which sounds a bit like Patrick McGhee's
experience in the cheerful 1960s TV show The Prisoner. The emphasis
is on highly specialised, sinister, labour intensive and secretive methods
of conditioning practised by the state and its modernised inquisition; to
which the Situationist response, at least in this early article, is to
imagine a highly theorised, provocative, play-intensive and elusive method
of artistic experiment. But the most powerful form of conditioning was
never secretive, in the sense at least that its purpose was to be as well
known and pleasantly ingested as possible. This is of course advertising,
and the shift in Situationist programs for revolutionary aesthetics (from
highly technical experimentation to quick and easy vandalism) can perhaps
be understood as their way of keeping up with capitalism at large, not
just the police, in the race for control of the means of conditioning. A
stupid advert requires only a quick bit of damage to be turned against its
owners, and this is one aspect of advertising-the fickleness inherent in
its obvious stupidity-that made it nice and convenient as a half-baked if
not raw material for Situationist art.

To go a step further,
revolutionary artists needed to understand not just the transparent
principle behind advertising as a substitute for price competition, but
also the research industry responsible for its particular strategies and
aesthetics. That research industry has been unashamedly psychological from
its beginnings. It has subordinated psychology to its own ends so
effectively that some of the most cutting edge experimentation in the
field is now in what is called "neuromarketing," a procedure for observing
the physical and chemical behaviour of the brain of a volunteer consumer
as he sits in a laboratory and gapes at a slideshow of prospective
advert-types. This is all well enough known, though hardly well enough
hated. Of more interest from an intellectual point of view is the relation
between Freudian psychoanalytic theory and market research. What is the
value and utility of the basic Freudian tropes for market research; and
what is their value to the enemies of capitalism, not as a means of
describing why this or that individual may or may not feel dispirited that
the position formerly occupied in his mental apparatus by his mother is
now occupied by a Dyson hoover, but more radically, as a means of
diagnosing the ontogenetic origins of homo consumer in general? Is
Freudian theory up to the job of providing a critique of commodity-life
under the dance-steps of universal marketing, or is Freud's total failure
to produce such a critique of his own evidence enough that psychoanalytic
thinking is essentially irreconcilable with revolutionary thinking? Put in
Situationist terms: can Freudian theory be detourned? Can we pull off a
detournement not just of the images of advertising, but of the
psychoanalytic research methods used to come up with them? The history of
the British and American pop song is a good testing ground for this
problem.

In 1964, the same
year that Lord Reith was commissioned by an anxious government to look
into the effects of TV advertising, an American psychoanalyst called
Frances Hannett published the most detailed and elaborate psychoanalytic
paper on American pop music to date. (6) Hannett noticed that her patients
would often arrive for their therapy sessions humming or whistling a tune,
or would tell her that a certain tune was stuck in their heads, or they
would find that certain tunes burst into their memory at important moments
of self-recognition in the course of their treatment. After analysing the
sudden appearances of these tunes and what Freud would call their manifest
content, i.e. the narrative or sentiment in their lyrics, Hannett
concluded that they are "a 'voice of the preconscious' and must be
understood in the same way as a dream fragment, a fantasy, or a repetitive
act". (7) This agrees with both Freud's and Theodor Reik's view, that, as
Reik puts it, "the incidental music accompanying our conscious thinking is
never accidental". (8) Hannett set out to examine the entire body of
chorus lyrics from American hit songs published between 1900 and 1949. She
explains her decision not to include contemporary hits as follows:

This period [i.e.
1900-1949] was chosen because it covers the half-century during which
popular music had its heyday and because the end of World War II
ushered in various artificial influences which made it difficult or
impossible to determine the intrinsic popular appeal of more recent
so-called 'hits'. (9)

These "various
influences" Hannett lists as "commercial rivalries among music producers,
radio networks, disc jockeys etc". Her definition of a hit song
is

one which has
gained top ranking or appreciable acceptance by the public. Before
radio, the popularity of a tune was determined by the sales of sheet
music and Victrola recordings. Later, with the advent of radio and
television, the success of a song depended on the amount of exposure
it received through these media as well as on the sales of recordings
and sheet music. (10)

Hannett's methodology
excludes as a distortion of the real data the entire edifice of the
culture industry in its post-war form. The underlying assumption is that
permeation of the unconscious by music is more meaningful from a
psychoanalytic point of view the less it can be chalked up to marketing,
which Hannett calls "exposure". This an obvious theoretical convenience,
analogous in some ways to Wilhelm Reich's preposterous idea that "there is
no use in individual therapy...from the standpoint of the social problem"
except money-making, and that analysis conducted on socialist principles
has to "go back to the unspoiled protoplasm" of the strictly infantile
psyche. (11) Both Reich and Hannett advocate an approach to analysis of
the unconscious founded on the idea that the spoliation of an individual's
psychic operations by capitalist culture makes psychoanalytic research
either gratuitous or methodologically compromised. Both attitudes are
plainly romantic and undialectical.

Notwithstanding that
criticism, Hannett uncovered some useful data on the manifest content
of hits songs according to her limited definition of them, which I've
reproduced as Fig.1in your
handouts. The significant result of her observations is first of all that
the great majority of all hits songs are love songs or "romantic" songs;
and secondly that the manifest content of their lyrics is limited to a
pretty small and unvarying range of reference-terms, symbols and affects.
She concludes that "the popular lyric expresses unconscious infantile
attitudes" and that "unresolved whole or partial attachments to the image
of the preoedipal mother provide the latent matrix for American popular
songs". (12) From this she extrapolates a judgement about human valuation
of freedom in general: "although man values his freedom, there remains
in him the paradoxical tendency to feel it as a rejection when it means
separation from the mother". (13) Amongst the most popular themes that
crop up in the hits she examined is a category defined in Freudian terms
as "anaclitic affects": possessive
dependence, depressive and hostile affects, separation anxiety and dreams
of wish fulfilment. The frequency of these affects as themes in hit songs
is shown to have increased significantly since the late 19th century,
when hits songs were more often undisguisedly about death and sex (a trend
that was powerfully restored to life in the last quarter of the 20th century
by the mass popularisation of rap and hip-hop).

So what is an
"anaclitic affect"? The term Anlehnungstypus or "anaclitic type"
was invented by Freud in his 1914 paper 'On Narcissism'. Translated
literally, it means "leaning-on type," according to the OED gloss "a
person whose choice of a 'love-object' is governed by the dependence of
the libido on another instinct, e.g. hunger". The anaclitic type of person
experiences the full potency of erotic longing for somebody only when he
feels that this somebody will satisfy what Freud called his
"ego-instincts". That is, he is driven by his libido to find a "succession
of substitutes" for the nourishment and protection that his mother and
father provided for him in his infancy. He leans on these substitutes,
driven by a sense that he will otherwise be exposed helplessly to the
elements of a hostile environment that he couldn't possibly survive on his
own. What Hannett lists as "anaclitic affects" are the ravages of the
world's hostility against him.

The great prominence
of these pathogenic affects among the tired old themes of pop music both
in the early 20th century and in our own eternally recurrent and samey
chart music is, logically enough, evidence that a great part of the
psychic life of their mass audience is anaclitic; or at least, that this
mass audience is taught by lyrical rote to think of itself as anaclitic
and thus actually to become so. As Adorno and Horkheimer insisted, the
defence of the marketing men that they are just giving the people what
they want is undoubtedly true, but only because the condition of wanting
has itself been downgraded in advance by these same innocent marketing men
into a stupefying adjunct of the culture industry.

Hannett's data is
essentially market-research. What it tells us about the drives and needs
of homo sapiens finds its ultimate consequence in the life of homo
consumer. What could be more useful to the marketing operations that
decide the content of pop music than a complete breakdown of the sales
figures for every symbol and affect, published under the disinterested
imprimatur of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly? Yet her research is also
conveniently incomplete. What Hannett's research excludes from vision by
the ruse of ignoring the popularity of post-war hit songs is the one
dominant category of which all the other themes in her list are
sub-categories. This is the category of what I will call commodity-love.
The heart, sexuality, nostalgia and all the other themes of pop music are
not the unmediated symbols and drives of the lyrical psyche that Hannett
implicitly proposes they are; each of them is transmuted by its appearance
in a pop song into something quite alien to the human protoplasm. They
become the symbols and drives of commodity-love, by which I mean both the
love of commodities and love itself in commodified form. This is not to
say that nothing can ever be wrung out of these hits songs except the
experience of commodification; rather, it is by a process of transition in
the mind of the adolescent listening to pop music that real love fresh
from the bubbling libido is imperceptibly rehabilitated into
commodity-love. Pop lyrics with their saccharine buffet of anaclitic
affects are possibly the most powerful machinery discovered by capitalism
to effect this transition. They are an inducement to choose one reality
principle over another in the market-place of competing reality
principles. The tears that sometimes reappear in our eyes when we're
knocked about by an old love song are not 100% pure commodity; they have
enough of our own infancy blent into them to keep the eyes from which they
tip out firmly shut to the true business of their social and economic
production and the problem of who owns the means of it.

In his essay on
narcissism Freud lists six possible "paths leading to the choice of an
object". Anyone condemned only to one list or the other, or to an
imperfect combination made up of both, cannot in Freud's reckoning ever be
really happy. Freud writes: "a real happy love corresponds to the primal
condition in which object-libido and ego-libido cannot be distinguished".
(14) That is, we are only truly happy when we enter a love relationship
that gives us the illusion of being once more primally unable to
discriminate between love for ourselves and love for our partner. In more
technical terms: love for a "love-object" and love for the ego itself. In
the remaining part of this paper I hope to show that this "real happy
love" is exactly consonant with the commodity-love experienced by
teenagers listening to pop songs; and that this psychological triumph of
the culture industry will meet its most ruthless criticism only in art
which, like Frank Zappa's We're Only In It For The Money, conducts
a full-blown assault not just on the bourgeois sensibilities of its
audience but on the deep psychical stupefaction that fuels capitalism's
recuperating-machines.

Picture a naked
teenage boy prancing around in front of the mirror in his bedroom, with a
hairbrush in his fist, singing 'The Power of Love' by Huey Lewis and The
News. Exactly what kind of narcissism is this? It is none of Freud's four
types of narcissistic love, not even the third, since he himself would not
like to be Huey Lewis so much as to believe that 'The Power of Love' was
actually his own creation. In Totem and Taboo, Freud discusses what he
calls the "animistic" thinking of archaic societies and its residue in
contemporary psychical processes. Animism is a structure of thought in
which "things become less important than the ideas of things," such that
"relations which hold between the ideas of things are assumed to hold
equally between the things themselves". (15) Animistic thinking originates
in the belief that thoughts themselves are "omnipotent". Freud remarks
that "in the animistic epoch the reflection of the internal world is bound
to blot out the other picture of the world-the one which we seem to
perceive". The result, he says, is "a general over-valuation...of all
mental processes". (16) The world turns into a spectacle of our own
creation, its events and appearances governed by our own essentially
infantile thinking. The contemporary American psychoanalyst Leo Balter
describes how this kind of thinking is an important part of what he calls
the "aesthetic illusion," a kind of best-possible experience of art
"accompanied by narcissistically enhanced elation". (17) When we as
teenagers listen to music that we love, we sign up for the illusion that
it somehow makes us more loveable; but why, and how? As with much of
Freud's writing, this moment in Totem and Taboo needs only a quick
Marxist detournement to hit its peak truth-content. Freud writes of "a
general overvaluation" of mental processes in animistic thinking. But in
the case of the "aesthetic illusion" triggered by pop music in the heads
of teenagers on the slide from real love into commodity-love, the
"overvaluation" is literal and economic: it is surplus value; and the
"mental processes" are no longer those of a primitive animistic community
which constructs a meaning for its own life and death through ritual
expressions of wishing; instead, the "mental processes" are the data of
market-research. Our teenage participation in the new ritual of pop-music
consumption is still animistic: we consume music-commodities as if they
were our own mental processes. Think again of that nude 13 year-old. He
writes out the lyrics of a song, and by writing them out in his own
handwriting he gets this feeling that the song is being pulled into his
life and his heart, and even that by writing it out it has become a song
about him or to him, thus repressing in his mind as totally irrelevant the
memory that he bought it in Woolworth's: it has become his own creation.
And how does he love this part of himself? At once in a narcissistic and
an anaclitic fashion: a commodified mirror image of Freud's "real happy
love" in which "object-libido and ego-libido cannot be distinguished". We
lean on the commodity we are.

The similarity of
this adolescent good behaviour to the claims made by post-structuralist
theoreticians of reading as a kind of production on the part of the reader
herself are pretty obvious. I might even speculate that this theoretical
attitude can be explained ontogenetically as a late resistance to the
reality principle, mounted by adult litterateurs who never really
stopped believing that the pop songs they bought when they were first
learning how to masturbate were essentially their own creations. Roland
Barthes made something interesting out of this fantasy, but he grew up
playing Schumann sonatas on the piano; whether anything interesting will
be made out of it by a generation fucked daily in the oval window by Girls
Aloud and Justin Timberlake is open to some sort of debate.

The animistic
thinking brought to life by the narcissism of this "aesthetic illusion,"
says Balter, "conceives the external world as having properties
corresponding to the contents and forms of infantile mental life". But the
external world does have these properties, not just in the image of it
projected by adolescent narcissism but in its real, material image. This
is the triumph of the culture industry: it turns what Freud called the
overvaluation of mental processes" into real overvaluation in the form of
surplus value realised into capital. It will continue to do this for as
long as it manages to deceive its flock of consumers into the conscious or
unconscious belief that the "mental processes" given to them as pop-songs
are out there only to be fused back into the consumer's own spontaneous
feelings and needs. That is to say, for as long as adolescents on the
slide into adulteration go on believing narcissistically that these
cynical pieces of shit are in some magical sense their own creations, only
to buy in ten years or so later to a reality principle engineered by the
culture industry that tells them to be forever nostalgic for that
delusion. Narcissism is both the psychic end-point of the capitalist
finishing school and its mass ontogenetic breeding ground; and if the self
we fall in love with can be sold to us at a decent profit margin, so much
the better.

So what would an irrecuperable
art look or sound like? And why do I think that We're Only In It For
The Money is one such work of art? One of the first conditions is
that it should totally and violently frustrate the impulse of its consumer
to fantasise that it is his own production. Art that matches the description
broadcast by Roland Barthes is by definition recuperable. The "reader
as producer" is merely a lone practitioner of recuperation acting out
in solitude her variations on the main act of social recuperation to follow.
She is a one-woman test audience. How can art be so violent that it resists
this kind of individualistic recuperation? At a very basic level, it needs
to have within it somewhere or other an unadulterated FUCK YOU in the
form of some ethical or political or sexual exhibition that the one-man
test audience could never imagine to be his own production, because its
confrontation against him is too powerful and total to be subsumed under
the product-heading of his own immediate cognition. And it needs to be
a FUCK YOU that has the final word, not one of those substitutes in capitalism's
endless succession of substitutes that ends up sounding more like, fuck
you because after all you sort of want to be fucked and anyhow we both
know that neither of us is really the target of any of this so we can
keep these sapient grins plastered across our half-sapient faces. That
is, the work of art must have something in it, some moment, that is not
capable of being subordinated to the free play of abstract interpretive
fantasy that is then declared to be the work of art itself. It needs to
get a stranglehold on the imagination of its audience until they are made
to gasp out in panic for some real air, rather than the steady drift of
ether through the consumption snorkel. It needs to be irresistibly mediated
by the suffering that consumer narcissism causes and relies on for its
continued dominance. It needs at some level to be something that we can't
agree with or don't want, even if later, with the benefit of dialectical
reflection, we decide that we agree with it on account of its disagreeableness
and want it on account of its unwantableness. In fact, irrecuperable art
is conceivable as a source of pleasure only with this dialectic up and
running. It is a condition of our enjoying the irrecuperable art work
that what we most sweetly enjoy is how it offends and needles against
the institution of enjoyment itself as the latter exists in and for capitalist
culture. At its best, Zappa's music is a jump cable clamped on to the
dialectical motor of the brain and sexual body, using its unadulterated
FUCK YOU to rouse that motor back into action after a life spent rusting
cheerfully in the pop music garage. We're Only In It For The Money grabs
the market-research data out of the hands of its owners and reproduces
every affect on Hannett's list in a gloating duplication of all the average
love songs it can muster, thus decisively reducing their stupefaction-potential
to zero. If I love it, it's because it also grabs hold of the commodified
mirror of Freud's "real happy love" and gets it out of my face, pushing
it back in to the faces of those whose stupefaction amounts finally to
job security for the market-researchers for whom stupidity is bread, butter,
milk and honey all rolled into a revolting luxury éclair.

FOOTNOTES

1 See the propaganda
article against commercial-free broadcasting by Ian Murray, dated 11
August 2003, at the Competitive Enterprise Institute website,
http://www.cei.org/gencon/019,03597.cfm: Reith "believed strongly that the
BBC should become a single broadcaster for the nation, bringing news and
culture to those who had never experienced either before. Reith felt the
BBC needed "the brute force of monopoly" in its mission to "inform,
education [sic] and entertain... [and] bring the best of everything to the
greatest number of homes". Reith was very much an establishment man.
During the 1926 general strike, he argued that the BBC ought to support
the government absolutely, because the BBC was the people's service and
the government the people's government".

2 Ibid.

3 Compare Freud,
Beyond The Pleasure Principle: "a particular way is adopted of
dealing with any internal excitations which produce too great an increase
of pleasure: there is a tendency to treat them as though they were acting,
not from the inside, but from the outside, so that it may be possible to
bring the shield against stimuli into operation as a means of defence
against them. This is the origin of projection". The Standard Edition of
the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Vintage, 2001) vol.18 p.29.
Freud's analysis is something of an allegory for the social and economic
manifestations of patriotism and xenophobia.

4 See Paul A. Baran,
'Theses on Advertising' (1964) The Longer View (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1969) p.224: "Under oligopolistic conditions, price
competition is avoided as a response to the insufficiency of demand and
other forms of sales effort are substituted". I will return to this word,
substituted.